Chapter Ten

Fiona Frost reached out blindly and patted the side of the bed where her husband slept. Thaddeus was not there. He was always there, so it took some time for her to reconcile his absence with what she could recall of their last conversation. Her recollection was incomplete. She had pieces of a whole that would never come together without someone showing her how they fit.

She pushed herself upright and leaned back against the iron rails of the headboard and for once did not mind how one of them pressed uncomfortably against her spine. The discomfort helped focus her thoughts. Her eyes were not so bleary from sleep that she couldn’t make out the shaft of moonlight stretching across the hardwood floor and spilling onto the rug. The silver-blue light was like a stain, muting the vibrant reds and golds in the rug to shades of gray and dirty mushroom. Turning away, she pinched the slim bridge of her nose between a thumb and forefinger and closed her eyes again.

“Phoebe,” she whispered. “We argued about Phoebe.”

Fiona let her hand fall away from her face and took a deep breath through her nose. She held the breath until she couldn’t, and then she pursed her lips and let the air escape in a long, nearly silent whistle. Throwing back the covers, Fiona swiveled her legs over the side of the bed. Only one of her black velvet slippers was waiting for her. She had a vague memory of throwing the other. She looked around, located it under the padded stool in front of the vanity, and thought it had probably ricocheted off the armoire. She would not have thrown it at the vanity and risked damaging the mirror or breaking any of the little pots of cream and rouge or the atomizers that contained specific blends of fragrances that had been made especially for her.

She’d been angry, but she never lost control of a scene.

Fiona put on the slippers, found her robe draped over the oak chest at the foot of the bed, and shrugged into it. Without looking in the mirror, she gathered her thick auburn hair in one fist, expertly twisted it into a knot at the back of her head, and stabbed it with two ivory picks to keep it in place.

The front room of the house was deserted, as was the kitchen, Thad’s study, the dining room, and the formal parlor where they were meant to receive guests but rarely had occasion to do so. Fiona did not open the doors to any of the other bedrooms. Instead, she stood beside the great iron stove in the kitchen, close enough to the housekeeper’s quarters to be heard without projecting her voice beyond what would have been the first eight rows in the theater.

“Ellie! Wake up! I need to speak to you.” Fiona listened for sounds that Ellie Madison was stirring, and when she heard movement on the other side of the door, she lit a lamp and set it on the kitchen table. She folded her arms and rested one hip against the cold stove. She waited.

When Ellie Madison appeared, Fiona took note that it was unlikely that the housekeeper had been deeply asleep. She was a trifle too clear-eyed and alert to suit Fiona. It occurred to her that Ellie had been keeping vigil while Fiona herself had gone to bed.

She watched Ellie pat down wayward wisps of dark red hair as she stepped into the kitchen. A heavy plait hung over her right shoulder and she brushed it back. Her robe was haphazardly tied and she repaired that now, cinching it tightly around her waist.

Fiona was not impressed. Every gesture was calculated to support the façade that she had been sleeping, but Fiona did not confront Ellie with her suspicions. The housekeeper would never admit it, and it was of too little consequence to haggle over now. And, Fiona thought, there were practical reasons not to antagonize Ellie Madison. She would never get a cup of coffee if she did not sheathe her claws.

“They’re not back,” said Fiona.

Ellie nodded. “Seems so. The house is quiet. There’s a light in the bunkhouse that I can see from my room. Could be some of the hands are still up waiting for them.”

“Should I ask someone to ride into town? Ralph Neighbors? Scooter Banks?”

“Late for that now. The train’s known to be delayed from time to time.”

“It was supposed to arrive around nightfall. Midnight’s come and gone. Thad told me that delays mostly happen during the winter months.”

“That’s true, but . . .” She glanced at the coffeepot on the stove. “How about I make us a pot of coffee, and we’ll wait them out right here?”

Fiona appreciated the other woman’s predictability. She nodded. “Would you? I’d like that. Truth be told, the company more than the coffee.” She continued quickly when Ellie hesitated on her way to the stove. “Oh, but I’d appreciate the coffee as well.”

“Hmm.”

Fiona thought Ellie added something under her breath, sly boots that she was, but the need for coffee overwhelmed her need to know what she’d said. “The stove’s gone cold.” She offered this information almost apologetically, although they both knew it was not her job to start a fire or keep one going.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Fiona felt her hackles rise at the housekeeper’s cheerful response. No one could be that pleased about breathing life into the iron behemoth, no one, that is, unless the motive was to prove it could be done to the woman who had never been able to do it. Fiona wanted to spit, but her eyes fell on the coffeepot as Ellie pumped water into it, and she swallowed instead.

She watched Ellie as much for her movement as to take her measure. Fiona had never been able to help herself in that regard. If making comparisons had not been in her nature, it would have come to her eventually. Survival in the theater depended upon it, and she was, above all else, a survivor. When she competed for a role she wanted, she got it, and competition for a man was no different.

There was no denying that Ellie Madison was a handsome woman, a description generally approved for a female maturing gracefully through her forties, and Fiona allowed that perhaps in her youth Ellie had been quite pretty. Her hair had possibly once been a vibrant shade of red, but the years had faded it. Still, although Fiona looked for gray threads that were an inevitability of aging, she never found one. In Fiona’s mind, the answer was simple: Ellie plucked them out.

Fiona had known of the existence of the housekeeper before she ever left New York, indeed, before she agreed to marry Thaddeus. It was a comfort, though someone—Phoebe—might call it a condition, to know that she would not be responsible for preparing meals or beating rugs or doing laundry. Meeting Ellie Madison, though, had been, if not a revelation, then an eye-opener. Here, then, preparing coffee in the kitchen, laying kindling in the stove, setting out exquisitely painted china cups, was her husband’s mistress of the last twenty-plus years.

Thaddeus had failed to mention that when he proposed, nor did it come up in conversation as they traveled more than half the length of the country, and at no time since she had arrived at Twin Star had there been a single reference to the long affair. She did not expect to hear the truth from Ellie, but her husband’s silence was insulting. Did he truly believe she didn’t know?

Fiona understood why Thaddeus had chosen her over Ellie Madison. Serving as a man’s de facto wife as Ellie had these many long years made the housekeeper as intriguing and desirable as the furniture she dusted. She was attractive, like the cabriolet chair at the head of the dining room table; she was familiar, like the oil painting that hung above the mantel in the formal parlor; and she was comfortable, like the brushed velvet sofa in the front room with its slightly worn arms and a depression in one corner of the long cushion that perfectly fit Thaddeus’s trim ass.

Fiona was realistic about her own attributes. Ellie Madison could cinch the belt of her robe until she couldn’t breathe and Fiona was confident that the housekeeper still would not be able to achieve her classic hourglass silhouette. It was also unfortunate that Ellie spent as much time as she did out of doors without benefit of a parasol or a decent bonnet. Fiona’s complexion was fashionably pale. The kindest thing she could say about Ellie’s was that it was not.

Fiona was tall but not statuesque or overblown. She commanded attention with a gesture; she could turn her wrist and be certain that eyes would follow its graceful arc. Ellie was short, but not squat. Fiona allowed that a fair description would be that she was petite, and if Ellie garnered a man’s attention now, it was because she teased him with a plate of steak and eggs or an apple fritter.

Fiona inhaled deeply as Ellie poured coffee into her cup. “You certainly have my attention,” she said on a whisper of sound.

Ellie poured a cup for herself and returned the pot to the stove before she sat. “How’s that again?”

“Nothing important. Just finishing a conversation I was having in my head.” She raised the cup, holding it in her palms instead of by the delicate stem, and regarded Ellie over the rim. “This is nice. Thank you.”

“It is nice,” Ellie murmured. “Not much occasion to take a moment.”

Fiona said nothing. Ellie’s observation was true for her, but Fiona had plenty of occasions to take a moment. Lots of moments. Ellie knew it, too. Her comment was meant to get under Fiona’s skin, and it did, but not so that the housekeeper would ever know. Fiona had not been the toast of the New York stage because of her face and figure, although they certainly helped. No, she had been celebrated by critics and audiences because she could act.

Ellie sipped her coffee. “Your sister might have missed a connection somewhere. It’s possible she had to take a later train. That would explain why Ben and Mr. Frost haven’t returned. I bet they’re still waiting for her.”

It grated on Fiona’s nerves every time Ellie called Thaddeus “Mr. Frost,” just as if she had never shared his bed. Fiona had asked Thaddeus about it once, thinking they might have an honest dialogue about that relationship, but he had only said that it was Ellie’s way, and as many times as he’d told her to call him “Thad” or “Thaddeus,” she never had. There was no discussion after that, no room to maneuver the conversation in the direction she wanted to take it.

“Phoebe doesn’t miss anything,” said Fiona. “That includes trains, I expect.” She raised her cup to her lips, drank. It was not so hot that it burned her mouth, but more than warm enough to feel it sliding down her throat. Only a few drops of whiskey would have improved it. Then she would have felt it in the pit of her empty stomach.

“Do you want I should fix you something?” asked Ellie. “I can scramble some eggs. Warm the heel of bread left in the box over there.”

Fiona shook her head, chuckled humorlessly. Her eyes, the color of amethysts, slid sideways toward the drinks cabinet in the dining room. “Hair of the dog maybe.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do, but I am going to resist. I know when I’ve had too much to drink. Afterward anyway. Not when I’m drinking.”

“Mm.”

Fiona looked sharply at the housekeeper. “There’s something you want to say? Some judgment you want to pass?”

“No and no. I’m familiar, is all.”

“Who? You?”

“No. My husband. He had a taste for it.”

“Well, that’s where we’re different. I don’t have a taste for it. I don’t even like the taste of it, it’s only that sometimes . . .” She stopped, not because she didn’t know what she wanted to say, but because when she heard the words in her mind, she knew she did not want Ellie Madison to hear them, too. Ellie, though, was nodding faintly, as if she’d heard them anyway, and that made Fiona want to throw something, if not at the oh, so sympathetic housekeeper pretending to be her friend, then at the wall. Contrary to her instincts, she didn’t. She carefully set her cup in its saucer and folded her hands in her lap, where Ellie could not see how tightly they gripped the folds of her robe.

“I’m out of sorts,” she said. Her tone captured the nuances of both embarrassment and regret. “I worry about Phoebe. I think it was a mistake for her to accept Thad’s invitation. I miss her. Of course I miss her, but I could have gone east, was planning to, in fact, and then Thaddeus informs he’s asked her to come here. Can you imagine? Without consulting me, he just extended an invitation.”

“Mr. Frost has been making decisions on his own for a lot of years.”

“Is that an excuse?”

“No. An explanation.”

Fiona did not like having her husband’s behavior explained to her, but then she’d opened this particular can of worms.

“If I may speak plainly, Mrs. Frost?”

Fiona could not imagine what she could say that would stop Ellie, so she nodded.

“If you want to be included, then you will have to remind him how to do it. Mary was his partner as much as she was his wife. I know because she was my friend, and she would not have stood for a man who wanted to run this ranch like a renegade. Do you take my meaning?”

Fiona was not sure that she did, but she nodded anyway. “I should have gone with Thaddeus to the station. He wanted me to.”

“I know.”

In her lap, Fiona’s fingers uncurled. She smoothed her robe, lifted her hands, and raised her cup to her lips again. “I was still so . . . so annoyed with him that I let him go off on his own. Oh, I know Ben’s with him, but it’s not the same. I should be with both of them, welcoming her. Thaddeus barely made her acquaintance in New York and Ben doesn’t know her at all. They might not even recognize her.”

“I believe Mr. Frost has a photograph of Miss Apple. Or at least he did.”

“A photograph?”

“Mm-hmm. He showed it to me. She’s a lovely young woman, is your sister.”

Fiona wondered how she did not know about the photograph. And if she did not know that, how much more was there that she didn’t know. Rather than being comforted by the knowledge that her husband could easily identify Phoebe, the realization disturbed her.

She stood, took the pot off the stove, and added coffee to her cup. She offered the same to Ellie, who shook her head. Shrugging, Fiona returned to her seat.

“I still can’t imagine why Phoebe agreed to come. There’s nothing for her here.”

Ellie’s eyebrows rose in mild surprise, not disapproval. “You’re here.”

Fiona was a long time answering. “I am, aren’t I?” Her gaze fell on her reflection in the coffee. “Yes, I certainly am.”